From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Leon Woestenberg" Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/1] Embedded Maintainer(s), linux-embedded@vger list Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2008 17:39:43 +0200 Message-ID: References: <1209577322.25560.402.camel@pmac.infradead.org> <200806102235.09598.rob@landley.net> <484F66F8.4020409@snapgear.com> <200806111941.51221.rob@landley.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=gamma; h=domainkey-signature:received:received:message-id:date:from:to :subject:cc:in-reply-to:mime-version:content-type :content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition:references; bh=XJ9AmW3kAAM13WZX5ebMtKS0poYvX7MP2WGoCQPpRUg=; b=Vs7OVCiXM3HbFJj0q7mgBNn7LF0wsgguumjLmqXwgrPNew/ggHC1feuSLG1CdXxc7+ hHwJLVD0jUUP8kretQC+OPjceBPPU/6G+eAf1lHKXu8m/8+4hbEWEV+i2Dcyrhp5O7qs W0i09r3Ng9NG7HfW6QP/pdvrKac3a+55p04wg= In-Reply-To: <200806111941.51221.rob@landley.net> Content-Disposition: inline Sender: linux-embedded-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: Rob Landley Cc: Greg Ungerer , Sam Ravnborg , David Woodhouse , linux-embedded@vger.kernel.org Hello all, On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 2:41 AM, Rob Landley wrote: > > Most packages don't cross compile at all. Debian has somewhere north of > 30,000 packages. Every project that does large scale cross compiling > (buildroot, gentoo embedded, timesys making fedora cross compile, etc) tends > to have about 200 packages that cross compile more or less easily, another > 400 or so that can be made to cross compile with _lot_ of effort and a large > enough rock, and then the project stalls at about that size. > Agreed, OpenEmbedded has a few thousands, but your point is valid. However, fleeing to target-native compilation is not the way to improve the situation IMHO. Moore's law on hardware also goes for the host, I think the progress is even bigger on big iron. Also, how much of the 30000 packages are useful for something like your own firmware Linux? > Distcc can take advantage of smp, but that won't help the ./configure stage > and I need to do some work on distcc to teach it to understand more gcc > If you want to build 1000+ packages, you don't need to run configure itself multithreaded. There are enough jobs available to keep 16/32 processors busy (beyond that, you probably end up in inter-package-dependencies stalling the build). This is just a guess from what I see during a multi-threaded bake and multi-threaded make on OpenEmbedded. > However, having one or more full-time engineers devoted to debugging > cross-compile issues is quite a high price to pay too. Moore's law really > doesn't help that one. > How about 30+ volunteers. > I'm not saying either solution is perfect, I'm just saying the "build under > emulation" approach is a viable alternative that gets more attractive as time > passes, both because of ongoing development on emulators and because of > Moore's law on the hardware. > I cannot follow your reasoning - Moore's law will help you more on the big iron side of things. That said, I welcome any effort (such as yours) to help improve the embedded Linux domain, I rather try to fix the cross-compile stuff of the few thousand packages I am interested in. Yes it hurts my brain. Regards, -- Leon